By structuring your content according to this guide,
your content may be automatically turned into an action on the Google Assistant. You can learn
more about Content Actions
on the Actions on Google docs.

Guidelines

Terminology: A podcast is an audio program that consists of one or more episodes.

To be eligible for inclusion in this feature, you must do the following:

The homepage, the RSS feed, and any non-blocked audio files must be exposed to
Googlebot; that is, they must not require a login, and must not be protected by
robots.txt or <noindex> tags.

If you want your podcast to appear in Google Play, you should also read the
Google
Play Music podcast RSS feed specifications. The RSS specifications for Google Play Music
and Google Search are complimentary but not identical, so if you enable support for one, you
neither prevent nor enable support for the other.

It can take a few days for any additions or changes to your feed or homepage
to be updated in search results or the Google Podcasts app. For more information on how to expedite this process, see Update a podcast.

RSS feed requirements

You must expose an RSS feed describing your podcast. This RSS feed should conform to the
RSS 2.0 specification,
with additional tags and values as described in the following section. Some of these tags are
podcast-level, and some are episode-level.

If you use any tags defined by either the Google Play or iTunes extension, be sure to include
the appropriate xmlns attributes in the <rss> tag at the top of your feed, as shown here:

Podcast-level RSS tags

You must include the required tags for your podcast to be eligible for display as a rich result
or in Google Podcasts. You can also include the recommended tags to add more information about
your content, which could provide a better user experience.

Required tags

<item>

One or more descriptions of individual episodes. You must have at least one
<item> element in the feed. For details on markup used to describe
episodes, see Episode-level RSS tags.

The author(s) of the podcast. You can provide an author by using one or both of the
following tags:

<googleplay:author>...</googleplay:author>

<itunes:author>...</itunes:author>

Examples: "Example Corporation" or "Dafna Smith".

Category tags

The general topic of the podcast to be shown in the Search results. The category must
be in English and & must be provided as &amp;. You
can provide a category by using one or both of the following tags:

<googleplay:category text="..."/>

<itunes:category text="..."/>

Google Play example

<googleplay:category text="Games &amp; Hobbies"/>

iTunes example

<itunes:category text="Games &amp; Hobbies"/>

Recommended categories

We recommend using one of the following categories:

Arts

Business

Comedy

Education

Games &amp; Hobbies

Government &amp; Organizations

Health

Kids &amp; Family

Music

News &amp; Politics

Religion &amp; Spirituality

Science &amp; Medicine

Society &amp; Culture

Sports &amp; Recreation

TV &amp; Film

Technology

Description tags

A plaintext description of the podcast, which is shown if the user clicks for more
information in Search results. HTML tags are ignored and the description is truncated
to 1,000 characters. If present, the description should generally agree with the content
on the podcast homepage, but need not be an exact copy of that text. You can provide a
description by using one or any combination of the following tags:

<description>...</description>

<googleplay:description>...</googleplay:description>

<itunes:summary>...</itunes:summary>

Explicit tags

If present and set to yes (case insensitive), this tag indicates that the
podcast contains explicit material. You can also tag individual episodes with this
property for finer-grained control. You can indicate explicit content by using one or
both of the following tags:

<googleplay:explicit>yes</googleplay:explicit>

<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>

Image tags

An image to associate with your podcast. It must not be blocked to Googlebot. You can
provide an image by using one or any combination of the following tags:

Episode-level RSS tags

You must include the required tags for your podcast to display in search results.
You can also include the recommended tags to add more information about your podcast,
which could provide a better user experience.

Required tags

<enclosure>

Fully-qualified URL of the episode audio file. Audio files with the following extensions
are supported: aac, m4a, mp3, ogg, wav. Episodes will only appear in search results if the
majority of the episodes are supported audio file formats. Ensure that these files are not
protected by robots.txt files, and are otherwise available to Googlebot.

A description of this episode, to show in search results. HTML tags are ignored, and the
description will be truncated to 200 characters. You can provide a description by using one
or any combination of the following tags:

<description>...</description>

<googleplay:description>...</googleplay:description>

<itunes:summary>...</itunes:summary>

Explicit tags

If present and set to yes (case insensitive), indicates that the episode
contains explicit material. You can indicate explicit content by using one or both of the
following tags:

<googleplay:explicit>yes</googleplay:explicit>

<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>

<guid>

A permanently-assigned, case-sensitive Globally Unique Identifier for a podcast episode.
Should be unique and unchanging over time, scoped to this podcast. GUIDs are compared to
indicate which episodes are new. If a <guid> tag isn't specified, the file
URL in the <enclosure> tag is used instead.

<itunes:duration>

Duration of the episode, in one of the following formats:

[hours]:[minutes]:[seconds]

[minutes]:[seconds]

[total_seconds]

In the first two formats the values for hours, minutes, or
seconds cannot exceed two digits each.

Homepage requirements

Your podcast must have a homepage that clearly describes what the podcast is about. The
homepage cannot have another <link type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate">
element on it. The homepage must be available to Googlebot at the exact URL specified in the
RSS feed. The homepage must have the following HTML element somewhere in the page code:

The HTML element must contain the following required attributes. You can also include the
recommended attributes to add more information about your podcast, which could provide a better
user experience.

Required HTML attributes

href

URL of the podcast's RSS feed.

Recommended HTML attributes

title

Short descriptive title of the podcast.

Here is an example of a minimal homepage for the RSS feed example above. It must be located
at https://www.example.com/podcasts/dafnas-zebras/ in order to comply with the
RSS feed's definition.

<html>
<head>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Podcast"
href="https://www.example.com/podcasts/dafnas-zebras/rss/podcast.rss"/>
<title>Dafna's Zebra Podcast</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Dafna's Zebra Podcast</h1>
<p>Most people don't realize that zebras actually make fabulous house pets.
They're clean, well behaved, and always well dressed. In this podcast series
we talk to zebra lovers and zebra experts to get to the bottom of this amazing
striped animal.</p>
</body>
</html>

Podcast management

Once your podcast feed has been parsed by Google, you can use Google Podcasts and
other tools to manage your podcast episodes and feed in Google products.

Preview

You can preview how your podcast may look in search results in the Google Search App on
Android. The preview tool generates a QR code, which you can scan on an Android device to see the
experience. Previewing a podcast requires v8.0 or higher of the Google Search App, even though
the experience is available on v6.5 or higher.

Update

Google Podcasts automatically checks for updates to feeds that we find on the web, often as quickly as five minutes. To ensure the update takes effect as quickly as possible, you can use Google
PubSubHubbub hub to ensure updates propagate as soon as
possible. For example, when you change your show’s description or release a new episode. Enter your feed URL in the Topic URL field and click
Publish. If your feed complies with the guidelines,
your podcast should be available within a week.

To avoid the manual process of entering a URL, you can automate the process with the
PubSubHubbub API.

Remove

To remove an episode, simply unpublish it from your RSS feed. Depending on a variety of
factors, the change may take effect in as little as five minutes or—in the worst case—as long as
a couple days.

To remove a podcast or episode altogether, you can block Google by using one or
both of the following tags, which may take effect within a couple of days:

<googleplay:block>yes</googleplay:block>

<itunes:block>yes</itunes:block>

These tags prevent the podcast information from appearing in Google Search,
Google Home, the Google Podcasts app, and Google Play Music results. These tags don't affect the
visibility of the host page in Google Search.

Another option is to block Googlebot from the RSS
feed, which may take effect within a few weeks. To remove content from Google's services under
applicable laws (such as copyright infringement), follow our
legal troubleshooter.

Distribute

To drive more traffic to your podcast from your site, we recommend adding a button to your site with the Google Podcasts app logo that opens directly to your podcast in the app. You can generate a direct link to create the link URL. You can also download the Google Podcasts brand assets to use our logo as a button on your site that links directly to your podcast.

Monitor

When a user streams or downloads an episode of your podcast, the episode is obtained directly
from the URL specified in the episode’s <enclosure> tag of the RSS feed. You
can distinguish Google Podcasts from other podcast players by looking at the user-agent HTTP
header:

Track requests from Google Podcasts by looking for the regular expression
\b(GoogleChirp|GSA)\/.

To split out analytics for Google Podcasts on Android from Google Podcasts on smart
speakers, look for the following regular expressions:

Google Podcasts on Android: \bGSA\/

Google Podcasts on smart speakers: \bGoogleChirp\/

To build the search index, Google periodically crawls RSS feeds
and episodes. However, these requests don't match the user-agent patterns described above, so
the requests don't appear as podcast listeners.

Troubleshooting

If your podcast isn't appearing in Google Search or Google Podcasts, try the following steps. Note that Google doesn't guarantee that every podcast will show up in Google Search or Google Podcasts.